A Radical Phenomenology of Wilderness Spirituality
2013
A Radical Phenomenology of Wilderness Spirituality
J.W. Pritchett
Abstract: In light of the rising popularity of wilderness psychology and spirituality and their practical applications, such as wilderness therapy, this paper articulates a phenomenologically based heuristic for navigating and interpreting one's primordial experience of wilderness encounter. The framework is derived from the historical development of Husserl’s common sense attitude via Patoĉka's revision and Erazim Kohàk’s radical experiential brackets. This understanding invites a subversion of the affective nature of one's common sense attitude through an experiential bracket. The brackets disrupt and deconstruct our common sense attitudes by allowing a space for dissonant affective elements of our experience to presence themselves to us. This influx of radical alterity incites a reevaluation of our given relationship to life the universe and everything else. The heuristic supports the subversion and deconstruction of our common sense attitudes in pursuit of a more open relationship to our life-world. Furthermore, the paper will attempt to demonstrate how the heuristic provides a language for navigating and making sense of one's wilderness encounter.
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